#TodaysReads: Multi-Billion Deals with China, Fighting a Python for a Dog & more (11.5.14)

Today my mom will die Today is mother’s day and I thought I’d share this story that’s just a reminder to love your mother while you can. Also, you could read this post I wrote for my mother on her birthday.

If your mother is alive, you don’t know just how lucky you are. Go see her on Mother’s Day and tell her you appreciate her. Yes, even if you’re gangsta. Especially if you are gangsta. You have the time now, but you don’t have it forever. So go ahead and tell her. It will burn her heart with love.

The two government officials did not disclose the actual financial value of most of the agreements and protocols signed but their aides said the deals are running into billions of Kenya shillings with implementation expected inside five years.

Depression is never the patient’s faultI’ve suffered through depression before, and anger, when my parents separated. It was bad. I got over it thankfully but this article brought it back to me so vividly. I wrote about it here.

People with depression need supportive family and friends, but above all, they need professional help.

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’Whenever someone argues for government surveillance then bring up this idiotic argument. I’ve written about the surveillance efforts of my own government. For me it’s never about what the current government is doing it’s about what future governments might do.

Another metaphor better captures the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s novel centers around a man who is arrested but not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what’s in store for him. He finds out that a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him, but he’s unable to learn much more. The Trialdepicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.The problems portrayed by the Kafkaesque metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition. Instead they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than of information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.